Absentee syndrome
Wherever you go, there you are. That's what people like to say. For me it's like the opposite. This "absentee syndrome" that Georgi Gospodinov describes in Time Shelter resonates with me:
So many places where I’m not. I’m not in Naples, in Tangier, Coimbra, Lisbon, New York, Yambol, and Istanbul. Not only am I not there, I am painfully absent. I am not there on a rainy afternoon in London, I am not there in the clamor of Madrid in the evening, I am not in Brooklyn in autumn, I am not there on the empty Sunday streets of Sofia or Turin, in the silence of a Bulgarian town in 1978.
I am so very absent. The world is overcrowded with my absence. Life is where I am not. No matter where I am . . .
It’s not just that I’m not there geographically; that is, I’m absent not just in space. Even though space and geography have never been merely space and geography.
I am not there in the fall of 1989, in that crazy May of 1968, in the cold summer of 1953. I am not there in December 1910, nor at the end of the 19th century, nor in the Eastern ’80s, stuck in their disco groove, which I personally loathe.
A person is not built to live in the prison of one body and one time.
I become very attached to places, honestly in some ways more than I do to people. My absence from particular places also weighs on me. Sometimes I like to think that those places feel my absence, too.